Taking Rorty seriously: pragmatism, metaphilosophy, and truth

ABSTRACT

Although Rorty’s work has become a touchstone for evaluating the metaphilosophical stance appropriate for pragmatism, the suspicion prevails that his ‘neopragmatism’ (NeoP) is undermined by a failure to take first-order philosophical problems seriously. We propose that this imputation is grounded in the assumption that he attempts to distinguish metaphilosophy from philosophy in order to insulate the former from the latter, and against it argue that pragmatism’s experimental attitude towards inquiry entails that there is and can be no such separation. We go on to suggest that philosophers such as Misak who define their ‘new pragmatist’ (NewP) position partly in opposition to Rorty’s, insist on this separation because they feel themselves answerable to some ‘transcendental’ urge. The conviction that to reject that urge is to reject the calling of philosophy itself is manifest in the debate between NeoP and NewP on the role of truth-talk. We argue that acceding to this urge prevents us from taking philosophy seriously, and by extension from taking Rorty’s contribution to philosophy in like fashion.

KEYWORDS:

• Richard Rorty
• metaphilosophy
• neo-pragmatism
• new pragmatism
• truth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This interest is not wholly uncritical; indeed, much of it is highly unfavourable.

2 For an attempt to downplay the differences between neo-pragmatists and new pragmatists, see Bacon (2012).

3 Knowles is explicit about this (cf. 99–100).

4 This is the sort of the change in self-understanding that Knowles would appear to disallow as being ‘pragmatic’.

5 For a defence of this point and of the associated claim that Rorty’s work from the 1970s offers a vindication of the practice of ‘traditional’ philosophy – albeit as part of ‘cultural politics’ – see Gascoigne (Forthcoming).

6 The temptation is to contrast theory with method. But as Rorty notes while for the pragmatist ‘it becomes easy to recommend an experimental, fallibilist attitude’ it is ‘hard to isolate a ‘method’ that will embody this attitude’ (1991, 66).

7 We might just as easily have chosen any one of the constellation of philosophical concepts that include ‘objectivity’, ‘reality’ etc.

8 Cf. Putnam: ‘That one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the basic insight of American Pragmatism’ (1992, 29).

9 In the sense that, as Wiggins reads Aristotle’s Ethics, ‘the subject matter of action (the province where it operates and the field of things it is concerned with) is inexhaustibly indefinite’ (2004, 480–481). The ‘intellectualist’, on the other hand, holds that ‘the matter of the practical can […] be treated with, handled, mastered or managed by means of principles or precepts that are at once general and unrestrictedly correct’ (op. cit.).

10 See, for example, Dewey (1930): ‘But after all, this practical work done by habit and instinct in securing prompt and exact adjustment to the environment is not knowledge, except by courtesy. Or, if we choose to call it knowledge … then … knowledge that things are thus and so … remains of a different sort, unaccounted for and undescribed’ (178).

11 It should be noted that this is an adaptation of Craig’s approach. He would not ‘endorse’ this pragmatist use of truth.

12 ‘[W]e are in the position of inquirers, not of examiners (to borrow Bernard Williams’s way of putting it)’ (Dewey 1930, 18). There are interesting parallels between Craig’s genealogical approach and Dewey’s naturalism (cf. 1930), and this section – and indeed, Craig’s analysis – could be greatly enriched by drawing on Dewey’s (1938) conception of inquiry.

13 Versions of this paper were presented at the second meeting of the Richard Rorty Society at Penn State University and at the conference Philosophy, Poetry, and Utopian Politics: The Relevance of Richard Rorty at the University of Cambridge. We are grateful to the organisers of those events, and to participants both for helpful responses to our paper and for their own stimulating contributions. We would also like to thank Colin Koopman and Chris Voparil for comments on an earlier draft.